Big companies always fish for talent, even when laying off people. The bar to get accepted is just a LOT higher.

Makes sense considering Android makes up 71.74% of the mobile market. Especially emerging markets, which is right up their wheelhouse.

Here in Mexico I just today made note of a phone service provider offering unlimited use of TikTok with their basic offering.

Personally I have never been anything but annoyed by the whole concept of the short videos, but my 5 year old daughter likes it. But then again I also get irrationally angry at programming tutorials in video form as opposed to text, so maybe I just don't "get it".

Those short form programming videos perpetuate the parts of this industry I really dislike, particularly the "look you install the latest dependency and things go :rocketship: :rocketship:". They never convey much nuance and are just frankly uninteresting, unless you want to just have passing knowledge of things existing.

Its because they have no net neutrality.

> but my 5 year old daughter likes it.

The tech is made to be addictive. You shouldn't let children use such a thing IMO.

Tutorial videos are demonstrably worse at education, but they are just much, much easier to produce than a well written step by step blog post.

If they are still trying to hire for Android, then it's unlikely that they would.

Sadly that's not how mass-layoffs work. It would make too much sense.

Chances are those openings are just bait, permanently there regardless of whether they actually need people.

> Chances are those openings are just bait, permanently there regardless of whether they actually need people.

100%.... most firms will have permanent reqs open just to see if there are outstanding candidates available.

Based on data from other "tech layoffs", very few if any core engineers will go. It'll be sales, recruitment, and an assortment of engineering-adjacent positions like solutions, industrial design, data analytics, and product.

I quite like this article from interviewing.io on the make-up of most layoffs by position based in LinkedIn data: https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other...

If you look at pure software engineering, it's about 5%. When we say "tech layoffs" we default to thinking "technical people", but that's not really the case.

This is extremely interesting data, and not what I would have expected. I'm aware HR and recruiting folks are having much much harder times than engineers in finding new positions, but assumed engineers had still been hit harder than that link shows.

For companies outside the big techs that are still wildly profitable and sitting on mountains of cash, laying off people is largely about refocusing on actual profitable activity. Keeping engineers around makes sense for them.

For companies that are on the cusp of profitability, or still actively burning through money, layoffs seem to be more about reducing burn, which means you're more likely to lay off highly paid engineers.

Still, 5% seems low. How do you square this with the observation that every open SDE role at a company that pays at least somewhat decently seems to have hundreds of applications? If so few SDEs were really laid off, I wouldn't expect the SDE hiring market to have turned as drastically as it did since last summer / fall.

> For companies that are on the cusp of profitability, or still actively burning through money, layoffs seem to be more about reducing burn, which means you're more likely to lay off highly paid engineers.

Bothering to do a layoff only makes sense if management wants to see the company survive. So, assuming that the only outcomes being targeted are the ones in which the company is still alive, consider the cost of replacing the employee later: at least right now, engineers are more expensive to hire than most other roles[0], so it could cost less overall to lay off HR/recruiting with the expectation that you'll backfill those roles in 9-18 months.

[0] for various reasons; to hire for any given role, you have to source, engage/recruit, interview (which takes up the time of the people on the team they'll join), somehow pick one or more of the candidates, make offers, and then onboard them. These costs are largely the same for any role, except that interviewing engineers costs engineering time (and it's harder to get enough quality candidates in the top of the funnel for engineers than other roles, so you have to spend more HR/recruiter time there).

> assumed engineers had still been hit harder than that link shows

That's what they want you to assume, that way us engineers feel pressure to fall in line. Welcome to the disinformation era.

5% is still pretty substantial, and the hiring market has not expanded to keep pace in a relatively short time.

Also, tech does have a lot of people on visa compared to other industries, who need to find a job within 60 days of termination or leave the country.

> I'm aware HR and recruiting folks are having much much harder times than engineers in finding new positions

Wouldn't HR and recruiting folks be able to look for work with companies the broader economy?

> I'm aware HR and recruiting folks are having much much harder times than engineers in finding new positions, but assumed engineers had still been hit harder than that link shows.

Hardest hit positions are "tech adjacent".

> For companies that are on the cusp of profitability, or still actively burning through money, layoffs seem to be more about reducing burn, which means you're more likely to lay off highly paid engineers.

Twitter was an example of that, but it was massively overblown by the media due to the company profile (and the identity of the buyer!).

Companies trimming senior talent are also slowing down the pace at which they can ship new features and products. That's ok short term, but longer terms, those that will be able to secure funding to keep their engineering will get ahead.

> How do you square this with the observation that every open SDE role at a company that pays at least somewhat decently seems to have hundreds of applications? If so few SDEs were really laid off, I wouldn't expect the SDE hiring market to have turned as drastically as it did since last summer / fall.

How many serious applications?

>How do you square this with the observation that every open SDE role at a company that pays at least somewhat decently seems to have hundreds of applications?

This has always been the case.

That data doesn’t have meta, google or amazon though???

I did try to find data but couldn't. Pure anecdata from friends in the industry and observations from vlogs/blogs, it's very similar, maybe a bit higher - reaching 10% perhaps but not much more.

The engineers that were axed were in business units that focused on unprofitable products, and couldn't or wouldn't relocate to other engineering teams in the company. Think Amazon's devices unit. Even then, the they were mostly kept around, and administrative roles were the first to go.

This blog is old. Not sure when it was written and with more layoffs this year, it may not be true !

> When we say "tech layoffs" we default to thinking "technical people", but that's not really the case.

It sounds a little callous but the way I make the distinction is working _in_ tech vs working _on_ tech.

I work in Big Tech. In the recent layoff, no software engineer was laid off within my org. But several program managers were laid off. I don't necessarily agree with that decision; they do the dirty work of pushing things forward, like doing cross-functional communication, thinking about timelines and milestones, organizing meetings and sometimes attending meetings on behalf of actual engineers. Without them, work is slower, more chaotic, and it is now impossible to ask a program manager to attend a meeting on your behalf. Guess what? Actual engineers' productivity drops.

There is bloat, of course, but there is also a reason why those tech-adjacent positions exist.

I agree. When I starting working we had a manager that was formerly a SWE on our team. They retired and were replaced by a series of people over the years that, for the most part, didn't have a programming background. At first I was a little dismayed over this, but I eventually realized it doesn't usually matter. It helps for them to have tech knowledge, but like you said they do things I wouldn't care for, but need to be done.

Interesting data! And very different from the anecdotes presented in another top HN discussion today, detailing fierce competition with software engineer job postings are receiving 100x the number of applicants compared to just a few months ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34913015

Not inconceivable that a fraction of employed people will have started applying around "defensively" or just for practice.

As someone who has been doing primarily Android engineering for the last 7 years. I am not surprised they are still hiring Android people. It is really hard to hire Android people. Every company I’ve worked (FANNG included) at struggled to fill Android roles. TikTok has reached out to me every month for the last year or so as well.

> It is really hard to hire Android people. Every company I’ve worked (FANNG included) at struggled to fill Android roles.

Why is that? Does iOS present similar hiring challenges?

Probably because anyone smart enough to work in tech is smart enough to have an iPhone instead of an Android

Ah yes, you're part of the "exclusive club" of people who own an iPhone; they only added 200M members to their ranks last year. Only the smartest, tech Rockstars... or anyone with a piece of government issue id and enough credit to get a 2-year cell plan.

Lol at thinking that Apple is somehow more secure. You've bought the lie. I use Graphene.

is it really about security in the original comment though?

Then what is it about? The poster claims it's about intelligence so i don't see how else it could be.

Maybe we're smart enough to want to be able to develop an app without having to use a mac, or easily push any app to our phone, etc.

I would actually argue the opposite. Any techie that loves to tinker on things will probably prefer an andriod phone over an apple one.

Really? I'd guess that, controlling for income, a larger proportion of tech workers use Android phones than the general population.

iOS's developers community had a head start - transitioning from Cocoa to Cocoa Touch is straightforward. Android didn't have this. Android SDK was a giant mess initially, there was no decent IDE for it initially, plenty of things that are `[something doThingWell]` in iOS are much harder in Android to implement.

Then there is fragmentation, availability of $50 devices that guaranteed to have issues with your app.

IMO iOS development is very pleasant (if you have someone other than you to deal with code signing) and Android isn't pleasant at all. Combine that with companies not caring about android apps... All of that contributes to a smaller number of good developers available.

> if you have someone other than you to deal with code signing

I hear that, though fastlane [0] makes like 1000x easier. Now my first step for any app is setting up a fastlane job to run Github Actions. My goal is to be able to push code and have an app show up in TestFlight without me ever needing to manually manage that. I can even make "blind" changes to the code and push it which is nice for old codebases or when I'm not on my main laptop but have access to my code.

[0] https://fastlane.tools/

It's been awhile, but I did both Android and iOS development for a product. iOS felt like a well thought out toolkit to build out very nice apps. Android was closer to here's a box of square legos, good luck. Getting to a polished app on Android was much harder [1].

Then there's the develop loop where the Android emulator is terrible, and the iOS simulator is great. So Android development meant constantly futzing with a device, which you really only want to have to do when you're ready really test.

[1] Games may be different since the game UI is often the same across platforms.

I did a minuscule amount of app development for android back in the like 4.0 days, and recently tried again, using kotlin and jetpack or whatever their UI kit is. It was awful. Everything is so hard to use. Your UI framework requires you to define completely separate """magic""" functions to preview how it is rendered, as if that makes any sense. All documentation seems to make the classic blunder of assuming you already know the answer, already are an expert in the platform, and already know what you are doing. Every example either hides some magic that they had to add, or requires you already know everything that the example should be teaching you.

I literally feel like I understand the Windows Win32 dev ecosystem, and I've never written a Windows app in my life.

At one point - TikTok was rumored to be worth $400B.

That's about 40% of GOOG - which prints $60B per year. TikTok makes nothing.

It's only growing revenues at 53%, and they're massively decelerating.

It's going to be hard to IPO for anything near that without ZIRP when they don't have profits and their growth rates are declining...

Easiest way to make the numbers look better for IPO is fire half the employees and make the other half work 3x as much.

ByteDance almost certainly does many tens of billions of revenue a year.

Prints money means profits.

Alphabets revenue in 2022 was $280B, with ~$60B profits.

ByteDance info is harder to find, but in 2021 it was ~$60B revenue, with $7B loss. [1]

https://musically.com/2022/10/07/bytedance-2021-financials/

Everyone is "hiring" all the time. Even zombie companies like Sears post developer jobs on LinkedIn.